DF Hack #27 first 10 minutes

[musical prelude]
R: Hey guys, welcome to Dwarf Fortress Talk! I'm Nate, also known as Rainseeker, and I'm here with Kyle,
   also known as Capntastic,
C: Hello!
R: and our illustruous leader Tarn Adams, also known as Toady One.
T: Toooooaady One!
[laughter (everyone)]
R: Welcome everybody! We are back, we are surviving the fires of northern California somehow and generally
   having a good old time.
C: Today we are going to do some Q&A from Dwarf Fortress fans across the world. But first we have some
   news on the Steam front. The Steam release has shown us some beautiful pictures of dwarves in armor
   with weapons.
R: (yay!)
T: [chuckles]
C: We have all sorts of fun interactions taking place there. What can you tell us, Tarn?
T: Yeah, so we have finally started in earnest on the dwarf pictures. There's been a lot of drawing,
   right now the dwarf has sort of 600 possible layers, and that's a number that's only growing.
   Now this includes all colors and every kind of... so if you've got a dark cyan cap for a peasant to
   wear and then a brown cap for a farmer to wear and a white cap for a stoneworker to wear then it has
   to go through and query those things and assemble the right layers when it kind of puts together this dwarf,
   right. Just piece by piece by piece by piece. And yeah there are a lot of them, lots of little tiles
   and we've just kind of gotten started on what the faces and so will look at. We're just using a set of
   random faces now, and we've got eight of those right now, but that'll change I'm sure.
R: Are you experiencing any slowdown from all the graphics you are adding or is that not a problem?
T: Oh, nah, not at all. Because those x number of layers - each dwarf ends up being made from like
   15, 20 layers - those are not being rendered in real time, printing every single layer. It bakes it
   all into a texture once, the first time you see the dwarf, and then it just has to update it when the
   dwarf changes something about themself, which doesn't happen all that often.
R: Nice!
T: So it's nice, cheap, cheap n' nice, the way we like it. It's like Dwarf Fortress has always been.
R: [laghter]
T: And yeah, it's cool, and of course there's a lot of different opinions of how the dwarves should be,
   and tilesets have gone all kinds of ways in terms of like whether you should show professions,
   whether you should show the actual clothing people are wearing, whether the color of the clothing
   should be based on the dyes and materials, whether the clothing color should be based on the profession,
   whether or not the item they're holding should be actual items like the axe and the pick for the miner
   and the woodcutter, but no one else uses tools, or whether like a fishingdwarf should hav elike a virtual
   fishing rod to sort of more accurately portray their profession even if it less accurately portrays
   what they're holding.
?: They're not going to have the color coding, are they?
T: Yeah, I mean it's, it's, [sound]. Yeah. So, what we're going to do is to have some options. [laughter]
   Which means more layers, more fun. But, it's cool. I mean, it's the most important picture in the game
   right, for Dwarf Fortress, presumably the dwarf, the dwarf being an important picture. So we're
   just going to have some options for people. Default is probably to show the professions with the
   color of the clothes they're wearing, just so people don't lose their miner at first when they're getting
   started with the game, and can see the pick. Yeah.
C: Out of curiosity, will the vampire dwarves, will they have any special graphics associated with them,
   or will they look just like everyone else?
T: So we have some little test pictures of things like zombies and so forth... we have kind of these
   placeholder zombies but then we have these ribs-exposed nasty pictures of various creatures at work
   at times and who know were we're actually going to ... where we land depends on all kind of factors.
   Some of them are technical and some of them are kind of how much resources we have to work on it...
   So we're settled on what we're going to get, but since there's not too many types of vampires I think
   that's the kind of thing we can probably get away with. You don't have to worry about like a
   rhesus macaque vampire the same way you have to worry about a rhesus macaque zombie, right.
C: Oh sure yeah.
T: Or giant rhesus macaque zombie, or a baby rhesus macaque zombie or a child rhesus macaque zombie.
   And just, you know, etcetera etcetera, it get's really... or a giant child rhesus macaque zombie,
   or what about a giant child rhesus macaque animated husk?
C: [laughter] Just the giant ball of tails from the rhesus macaque.
T: [laughter]
C: It's undead. It's rolling around with the tails.
T: Well that's a whole other thing too right, because if you chop up somebody's arm it could be animated...
C: Sure.
T: ... and so do we - there's too many things to really display with pixel graphics in high fidelity once
   you get into animal chunks and [chuckles] giant baby animal chunks.
C: [laughter]
T: So we're going to have to have some responsible scoping on that, but when it comes to a dwarf we don't
   really have to be so responsible, which is why we already have the 600 images and are just going
   from there. And the humans, goblins, elves and kobolds will get this treatment as well, because those
   are kind of the core important critters, and then we have animal people pictures drawn up. Doing
   like that many layers  for that many animal people is kind of prohibive, or whatever, but at least
   we can show animal people with like stuff in their hands, so at least that's something...
   to start, right, and who knows where it's going to go, afterward. Yeah, and I also... let's see...
   yes we had all the armor and there's currently I think 8 but I may be misremembering, but all the
   different materials, copper, bronze, steel, iron, ummm... and wood for the elves. Wooden armor,
   we have wooden armor pictures, we have... divine materials get a picture. Buf of course the
   devine materials, which are somehting you can find if you go look for them, are randomly
   generated and have all kinds of different descriptions, but you know right now we can just afford
   to "let's have one picture!", so they all look nice. But also artifacts get their own picture,
   so you can tell if someone's wearing an artifact helmet.
C: Oh nice.
T: And that's when they're worn, when items are on the ground we have more ability to add some detail
   to them, so weäve had some... this is not in yet, but we have some kind of protoype stuff of
   showing how damaged a weapon and how damaged clothing are, and you know should we put the vomit
   chunks on them [chuckles], and the blood splatter and that kind of thing...
C: I think the community says yes to all that.
T: That is probably the [?????] 08:20
?: Never say no.
T: Yeah. We have to say stop to some stuff at some point. And we have of course during the course
   of just the discussion about what art's goong to go in the game or whatever. Some times we've
   had to show some restraint, but it's going really well. I guess since we last had ... since the
   interview with Brian on the last episode we've also shown the zones interface, which is kind
   of the beginnings of what Dwarf Fortress is going to be like now. It's like you want to drag out
   a rectangle and click on some things and set the type of zone and so forth, and we're doing the
   stockpile interface, works that way now too. So you can just kind of drag out your stockpiles,
   you can repaint them which is nice. Before you could kind of delete pieces of stockpiles but if you
   wanted to add an annex to a stockpile with the same properties you couldn't really do it,
   so that's changed. Also you can make them larger - there was this really bizarre restriction on
   stockpiles that they could only be 31x31 tiles tops, and that's been lifted now.
[09:53]